How to remove/strip double or single quote from a string? - regex

Question

I have a file with some lines like these:
ENVIRONMENT="myenv"
ENV_DOMAIN='mydomain.net'
LOGIN_KEY=mykey.pem
I want to extract the parts after the = but without the surrounding quotes. I tried with gsub like this:
awk -F= '!/^(#|$)/ && /^ENVIRONMENT=/ {gsub(/"|'/, "", $2); print $2}'
Which ends up with -bash: syntax error near unexpected token ')' error. It works just fine for single matching: /"/ or /'/ but doesn't work when I try match either one. What am I doing wrong?

Answer 1

If you are just trying to remove the punctuation then you can do it as below....
# remove all punctuation
awk -F= '{print $2}' n.dat | tr -d [[:punct:]]
# only remove single and double quotes
awk -F= '{print $2}' n.dat | tr -d \''"\'
explanation:
tr -d \''"\' is to delete any single and double quotes.
tr -d [[:punct:]] to delete all character from the punctuation class
Sample output as below from 2nd command above (without quotes):
myenv
mydomain.net
mykeypem

Answer 2

The problem is not with awk, but with bash. The single quote inside the gsub is closing the open quote so that bash is trying to parse the command awk with arguments !/^...gsub(/"|/,, ,, $2 and then an unmatched close paren. Try replacing the single quote with '"'"' (so that bash will properly terminate the string, then apply a single quote, then reopen another string.)

Answer 3

Is awk really a requirement? If not, why don't you use a simple sed command:
sed -rn -e "s/^[^#]+='(.*)'$/\1/p" \
-e "s/^[^#]+=\"(.*)\"$/\1/p" \
-e "s/^[^#]+=(.*)/\1/p" data
This might seems over engineered, but it works properly with embedded quotes:
sh$ cat data
ENVIRONMENT="myenv"
ENV_DOMAIN='mydomain.net'
LOGIN_KEY=mykey.pem
PASSWD="good ol'passwd"
sh$ sed -rn -e "s/^[^#]+='(.*)'/\1/p" -e "s/^[^#]+=\"(.*)\"/\1/p" -e "s/^[^#]+=(.*)/\1/p" data
myenv
mydomain.net
mykey.pem
good ol'passwd

Answer 4

You can use awk like this:
awk -F "=['\"]?|['\"]" '{print $2}' file
myenv
mydomain.net
mykey.pem

Answer 5

This will work with your awk
awk -F= '!/^(#|$)/ && /^ENVIRONMENT=/ {gsub(/"/,"",$2);gsub(q,"",$2); print $2}' q=\' file
It is the single quote in the expression that create problems. Add it to an variable and it will work.

Answer 6

I did the following:
awk -F"=\"|='|'|\"|=" '{print $2}' file
myenv
mydomain.net
mykey.pem
This tells awk to use either =", =', ' or " as field separator.

Answer 7

This is because the awk program must be enclosed in single quotes when run as a command line program. The program can be tripped up if a single quote is contained inside the script. Special tricks can be made to use single quotes as strings inside the program. See Shell-Quoting Issues in the GNU Awk Manual.
One trick is to save the match string as a variable:
awk -F\= -v s="'|\"" '{gsub(s, "", $2); print $2}' file
Output:
myenv
mydomain.net
mykey.pem